Aux frontières de la fiction : l’avatar comme opérateur de réflexivité

Abstract

Whether considered as an activity (play) or as an object (game), video games are marked by reflexivity: playing requires the adoption of a distanciated and metacommunicative attitude, and video games use a plethora of metadiscursive processes (metalepsis, mise en abyme and mirror effect). This connexion between reflexivity and game is particularly clear when considering the avatar: by bringing together an empirical player and a fictional character, it works as a deixis. The frequency of reflexive figures in video games and the avatar’s pivotal role in these processes question the way video games can build a narration. Because they can interrupt the construction of the fictional world in order to generate a discourse on the game itself, these figures could indeed be seen as disrupting the figurative power of the game. In order to shed some light on the mechanisms behind the transgression of the boundaries of the fictional world and their function in articulating the game and the fiction, this paper will analyze these formal mechanisms through three distinct games: Portal (Valve Corporation, 2007), The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2013) and INSIDE (Playdead, 2016).

Keywords

• reflexivity
• avatar
• mise en abyme
• metalepsis
• immersion
• INSIDE